Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Q&A with Rufi Thorpe

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Dear Fang, With Love, and for
your characters Vera, Lucas, and Katya?

A: I knew I wanted to write something about bipolar
disorder. I’ve known two people very close to me who were diagnosed with
bipolar 1 and struggled with psychosis, and knowing and loving them was like
engaging with an optical illusion wherein my perception of them kept flipping
back and forth, sane, insane, sane, insane, as did their perceptions of
themselves.

It’s just a truly awful situation to be in— being diagnosed
with a serious mental illness. The treatment protocols are not exactly cutting
edge, and yet there is already this kind of boredom, as though it isn’t a
problem worth solving.

I was interested in the kind of self-doubt and constant
self-scrutiny that comes from being diagnosed with a mood disorder, i.e. is
what I’m feeling real/valid/sane? Am I being psychotic for thinking something
weird? Is this the prelude to an episode? That kind of self-doubt can become so
consuming it is a malady unto itself.

But I was also interested in what it is like to try to love
someone who is struggling with that, so I started thinking about this girl and
her father.

Q: Why did you decide to set much of the book in Vilnius,
and include World War II and its legacy as a major theme?

A: Well, I traveled to Vilnius while I was writing my first
book The Girls from Corona del Mar, and I really fell in love with it. It’s a
bewitching place, and there really isn’t any way of talking about Vilnius
without talking about World War II.

At the same time, I’m not sure there is a way of talking
about America in the 2000s without talking about Europe in World War II. It
seems to me that that cluster of ideas and crimes and blindnesses is
unavoidably central.

Q: Can you say more about the role of mental illness in the
book?

A: As I mentioned, I have had a long term interest in mental
illness. I was actually very conflicted. I originally wanted to write a version
of this book that took place when Vera was in her 30s— it would have been a
very different book and would have given me a lot more room to explore exactly
what a life with a mood disorder is and isn’t.

In a way, by keeping Vera so young and her diagnosis so
fresh, I kept the book from really exploring mental illness in its full
complexity because the characters themselves are only just beginning to
understand what they are up against. It was a compromise I felt I had to
make.

Q: The book includes sections that are in the form of
letters and e-mails. Why did you opt to tell the story in a variety of
different ways?

A: Originally the book was solely in Lucas’s point of view,
but once I started writing Vera’s voice, she really wrote herself, she just
exploded.

It was actually difficult finding a balance between the two
sections because different readers either wanted more Vera and loved her, or
else found her grating and tiresome and wished she would just shut up!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A book about boats. Also, you know, mothers who are bad
at being mothers and daughters who are bad at being daughters.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I have a 12-year-old turtle named Fred who lives in our
kitchen. My husband brought him into the marriage. Well, we always assumed it
was a “he” but then it laid an egg a few years ago. So now it is a girl named
Fred.

Thank you so much for reading and for hosting me on your
blog! It’s been such a pleasure!

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).